The Yellow House

Oh, early summer. Nothing in the garden but greens and radishes and potential. There are some strawberries and rhubarb kicking around the markets, definitely exciting, but not really dinner. Some bolting arugula and peas and zucchini blossoms. But we’re still waiting for the onslaught.

It’s warming up here, but it’s not unbearable yet. June in Virginia is a slow slide from spring into a green, thick humidity that practically vibrates. We’re still getting some breezy, non-swampy days, though. Even though all the magazines are telling us that it’s GRILL TIME NOW, I’m still cooking inside quite a bit, cleaning out pantry and freezer.

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I love Buvette, the West Village Manhattan restaurant by chef Jody Williams, but I have only eaten there once. Luckily, I was gifted the Buvette cookbook this past year.

French-y, well-sourced, market-driven food is everywhere nowadays, so it takes a good cookbook to actually make me care about someone’s particular spin on the roast chicken or aioli. The Buvette cookbook makes you care.

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I was the lucky recipient of an unexpected windfall last weekend. Ben’s grandmother is in the process of moving out of her home of 50 years, and, in that sad-ish but grateful way, her son and daughters are kept busy divvying up the accumulated belongings that would otherwise become the casualties of downsizing.

My haul from this process was a yellowing envelope, cracked and brittle at the corners. Ben’s mom placed it in my hands, telling me, “I knew this was for you.”
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I am bad at breakfast. While it may be easy to assume that I, of the let’s-cook-dinner-every-single-night! ilk, eat a decent breakfast every morning, that would be incorrect. (Especially if by “incorrect”, you mean “resoundingly, totally not true”.) There are a lot of factors that culminate in me messing up breakfast, but the main one is this: I take a train into the city at an hour that makes most people cringe, and I’m just not that hungry when it is kind of-sort of STILL NIGHTTIME.

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Now that summer’s over, I took a few hours to clean up some of the herb plants in our front garden before they get frosted. I collect bundles and hang them high in the kitchen where it’s typically pretty dry and well-ventilated, and where they aren’t exposed to too much sun. » Click to read more